How to behave like a human
by tinglingsensation
Summary: Follows the events in Skins Pure (Season 7, EP 3, 4) Jakob gets picked up by a stranger after Cassie leaves him behind.


How to behave like a human

_You're beautiful and you don't even know it._ The words spill from his mouth, are being forced out of his lungs. It's painful, the way she doesn't understand. So he runs. But there is no way he can stay away from her for too long, so he comes back, always comes back.

Eventually, she comes around, lets him take her photos. Lets him into her life. Takes him to see her home, her father, her brother. Never before has he shared that kind of intimacy with anyone. No doubt he never will again. He stares at her sleeping form next to him in her father's bed, and thinks she can't be real.

She tells him she loves him after their pictures get used at a rave she went to. It's the first time anyone who isn't his family has told him that, and it feels big, heavy and light at the same time, expanding in his chest. For the first time in his life, he thinks he could be happy.

But then she ruins it. She betrays him in the only way possible, the only way that really hurts. She goes and lets someone else take her photo. He doesn't understand how, or why she did it. He starts following her again, watches her work at Pete's until her shift ends. He just wants to talk to her, he tells himself as he hides from her sight. He's just waiting to speak to her in private. But she's not alone, she's leaving with Yaniv and she's going home with him and she kisses him on the mouth and suddenly there's a hole inside him where she used to be. BITCH! He sends her the last picture he will ever take of her. Stands on the street and waits for her to come out and see how she's hurt him.

It's not her though, it's Yaniv, and he hurts him so, so much. Maybe his camera is broken, he doesn't know, doesn't care. She's touching his face, speaking to him and he stares at her, uncomprehending. He calls after her as she leaves, but she doesn't turn once. _That's all we'll ever get from her. _

He stays rooted on the same spot long after both Cassie and Yaniv have left. There's nowhere for him to go, but it's wet, and it's cold and he can't stay here forever. He pulls his camera close, checks it for damage. There's a scratch on the plastic, long and ugly, but it works and the lens is still intact. He gathers himself up and starts walking.

He wakes at break of dawn on a playground, badly sheltered by the slide he slept under. It's even colder than before, and he can't feel his toes. He's still sopping wet and maybe, he thinks, he could die here like this. He could, and nobody would miss him. He closes his eyes again and sinks back into the muddy grass. He's woken the second time by something poking him in the side.

It's someone's foot, clad in dirty sneakers. It belongs to a pair of legs in thin jeans. Over that, a thin plastic rain jacket, far too big for the woman wearing it. She looks spooked, until Jakob moves and attempts to speak.

She smiles.

"Thank god, thought you were a corpse for a minute there. Is everything alright with you? You have blood all over your face." She offers Jakob a hand to help him up. Jakob grimaces at her in an attempt to smile and stumbles backwards awkwardly.

"I..." he croaks. His throat is sore and his mouth is dry and speaking is even harder for him than it usually is.

"Do you need to go to the hospital?"

He shakes his head.

"Don't you have somewhere to stay?"

He lowers his gaze and presses his lips in a tight line.

"Do you want to come with me to warm up?"

He looks up at her, suspicious, but she has an easy smile and a welcoming gaze and he really is cold. He shrugs and looks down again.

"Then let's go, it's bloody freezing out here."

He follows her to an apartment building on the edge of the park. They are silent as they ride the elevator to the top floor. Inside her flat, she points him to the bathroom. He nods gratefully and disappears under the shower. When he's reasonably clean and warm, he finds a heap of dry clothes were his wet ones had been. He pulls them on and wonders who they belonged to. She's waiting for him in the kitchen, with a mug of tea and toast sitting on the table. He eats in silence, avoiding her gaze.

"Tell me about yourself" she says finally, sinking down on the chair across the table, her own mug of tea in her hands. Jakob swallows, coughs, blushes, bites his lips and stares down on his plate once again. He thinks he hears her sigh.

"At least tell me your name, then."

"Jakob" his voice is rough, and speaking hurts, as if he had screamed for too long. Maybe he has.

"And why were you sleeping on a playground when it's pissing like that outside?"

"Nowhere else to go"

"Why is that, Jakob? You don't look like a homeless person to me."

He shrugs, grimaces.

"Suit yourself, then" she says, and starts cleaning up the table.

"Sorry" he mumbles into his mug. She smiles and reaches over the table to pat his hair.

"You're sweet, Jakob, and probably dead on your feet, so I'll let you sleep now. But later today, I'd like you to tell me what's going on with you, alright?"

Jakob nods and waits for her to get him some blankets and a pillow. As soon as he's on the couch, he's asleep again.

He doesn't know how long he's slept, but when he wakes, it's dark outside. The flat is silent, and there's only one small lamp burning on the coffee table next to him. There's a sticky note pinned to it. It says _working the night shift to 7 am, food in the fridge, spare toothbrush on the sink._

Only now it occurs to him that he hasn't asked her name. Slowly, he stands up. He switches on the light, blinking against the pain in his eyes as he walks through the empty flat. He checks the clock in the kitchen. 5:46. After a quick stop to the bathroom, he returns to the kitchen. He finds eggs and cheese in the fridge and toast in the pantry.

She comes home to a warm breakfast, and something in her gaze makes him thinks that it has been a long time for her not to come home to a lonely flat. She slumps down in her seat and smiles up at him as he puts the food down in front of her. She tells him about work, a shitty job in a call-center. He smiles as she complains about rude customers and asshole bosses and thinks he could get used to this.

"Now, mystery boy. I think it's your turn now, isn't it?" He had dreaded this moment as much as he had anticipated it, but now he thinks he knows how he could make her understand. He nods, stands up and fetches his camera from where he had put it the night before. He sits down next to her and shows her his pictures. The ones on his camera aren't all of them, of course, but there are all the important ones. Cassie in her Window, Cassie in Wales, Cassie kissing Yaniv. He looks at her while she looks at the photos. Her face is carefully blank and his heart clenches. She might just kick him out, be scared of him like Cassie was at first.

"These are good" she says at last, her voice rough. "She's beautiful." She looks down again.

"You love her, don't you?"

"In a way." He shrugs.

"Was she your girlfriend?"

"No. It wasn't like that."

"What was it like?"

"It was pure."

She snorted. "Pure."

"Yes, pure."

"So you never slept with her?"

"I never slept with anyone."

"You're kidding."

He shrugged.

"Tell me what happened."

He hides his head in his hands. He wants to tell her, he really does, but he can't, not when she looks at him like that. He looks up when he feel her hands on his. She pulls them away from his face and shifts so she's sitting on his lap. He draws a shuddering breath and hides his face in the crook of her neck.

With his lips against her neck and his arms around her waist, he tells her everything, from the day Cassie started working at Pete's Café to the day he saw her kissing Yaniv. She's silent through it all, shifting only when his breath tickles her too much. By the end, he's uncomfortably aware of how close she's sitting, so close she's almost sharing his breath.

He wants to jump up, throw her off and run away, hurt her for making him feel the kind of proximity he had thought he would never know in his life. Instead, he inhales deeply and presses his face closer to her neck, grazing her skin first with his lips and then his teeth. Now it's her breath that hitches in her throat and her hand that clenches in his hair.

She turns her face towards him, looking into his eyes and then down to his lips.

"I wish someone loved me like that." She mumbles. He stares up at her, tightening his grip on her waist, pulling her closer to his chest. His breathing is labored and his pants feel uncomfortably tight under her leg. He closes his eyes in shame as he realizes that there's no way she won't notice. He hides his face in her neck again, desperate to stay silent.

She moves her hips and for a moment he fears she will stand up, but instead she moves in a way that makes him gasp and buck up against her leg.

"Fuck" he whispers and feels her laugh silently above him. She angles his face up to meet hers, pressing her lips against his cheek. She moves her hips again, and again, until she has him humping up on his own. His whole body is tightly strung, tingling, on the verge of breaking and he pants into her neck, mouthing at the warm skin. His hands are moving over her hips, her waist and her legs, never to high and never too low, just petting, caressing, touching.

"Jakob" she murmurs. He lifted up his face, flushed and sweaty, and she kisses him, pressing against him. She swallows the groan that escapes him when he spills in his pants, holding him and petting his hair as he comes down from it.

"Shit" he swears, catching his breath. She grins at him and he grins right back and somehow, he couldn't really remember how he could have been so miserable just hours ago.


End file.
